


The Offshoot's Tale

by frimfram



Category: Mumintroll | Moomins Series - Tove Jansson
Genre: Gen, Plot-critical conversations with trees
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-16
Updated: 2018-05-16
Packaged: 2019-05-07 19:53:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14678295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frimfram/pseuds/frimfram
Summary: One springtime, Snufkin doesn't come back.This is Moomintroll living with loss and joy, and a half-tree baby.





	The Offshoot's Tale

**Author's Note:**

> I have tagged this for major character death, which happens off-screen and obliquely (and you can tell who it is from the summary).
> 
> I do apologise that my subconscious evidently wants this poor character, who is naturally in fact my (and everyone's) favourite, dead.

One spring he didn’t come back.

Instead of sunshine there was squalling rain, and one morning out of the lowering clouds there came wingbeats, and a great belly, and a beast, and when it had circled the valley the beast landed outside the house and drew up its great and terrifying haunches. With surprising tenderness it laid down on the doorstep a battered and draggled package, which – when Little My was bold enough to stride right up to the dragon to retrieve it – proved to be a backpack.

They held it, and they looked at the dragon with its great head hanging and its great eyes closed, and the rain fell and fell and fell.

After a few days Moominmamma insisted that they hold a wake, and they did, and creatures they knew and creatures they didn’t all turned out in quantities. Mourners came from the valley and from the mountains and from the south, and one of these last was a tree spirit, a magnolia, bare-limbed but crowned with white flowers that had a cathedral-candle quality but blushed to a scandalizing pink. Every step the magnolia took was a wrenching effort, as roots seethed down from her limbs toward the welcoming soil and tried to anchor her fast in place. But she came, torn-up step after step, to join the sad party. Moominmamma watched her. She took in the roll of her hips, and the swell of her trunk, and she caught her eyes. _Ah_ , Moominmamma thought; _ah_.

After a week Little My opened the front door of a morning to go down to the stream, and there on the veranda, crowned with a single magnolia bloom and swaddled inside a beaten and unmistakable hat, was a baby.

Little My, who had not cried, stared and stared until she could not see through the water in her eyes.

The child was fair, with large eyes and a large nose, though not _so_ large, one supposes, if a Moomin is one’s point of comparison. He slept inside the hat until he was bigger than his auntie My, whereupon he took to wearing it, which necessitated walking with his head tilted back and his nose straight up in the air so that he could see out. Moomintroll, who carried him everywhere as a baby tied to his back with a cheerful scarf, lost sleep the first time he rolled over, and then when he crawled, and then more than ever over his first steps. The first time he and his adoptive little brother -- Moomintroll and the Snork Maiden’s son, born a number of years later -- camped out overnight, Moomintroll hid under a disagreeable bush five feet away to watch over them, and the two boys giggled themselves to sleep pretending they didn’t know.

The little boy was soon not so little. A skinny-limbed child who barely ate, subsisting on fresh air and sunlight, he loathed shoes and park-keepers with equal staunchness, and his face shone with joy when he could wriggle his bare toes into damp, undemarcated earth. Birds tried continually, whenever the hat was off, to build nests in his sandy hair. He liked to lie on the grass underneath a magnolia tree that had appeared in a quiet spot overlooking the house at just the time he had been born, and sometimes the wind in its slender branches was so musical he could almost hear words in it. For his part, he played the harmonica that, after several years, Moomintroll had found the heart to remove from the stricken backpack. It had been badly rusted, and the painstaking work of cleaning and shining it and restoring its music had taken Moomintroll a month of exquisite pain, which when it ended left his heart washed clean and soothed. They always meant to name the child properly, but Little My – as soon as she recovered her speech after his astonishing arrival – took to calling him Sprocket, and that was as far as they ever got.

Every year when the harvest moon appeared and the first horse chestnuts announced themselves in a prickly shower, Moomintroll began to fuss around his children in a way that made them sneak off to the beach and send him further into a panic. The littlest member of the Moomin clan, who was known as Spoon, had an alarmingly adventurous streak that delighted his grandpappa and discomfited his father in equal parts. He, more than Sprocket, led the initiative to build a raft and sail it down the river to the point where it emptied itself headlong into the sea –- a project that Moomintroll banned outright, until Sniff pointed out that he himself had accompanied Moomintroll on a far more dangerous version of the same exercise in their own youth. In any case, it was in truth probably the banning that most piqued Sprocket’s interest in the whole undertaking. While Moomintroll was absorbed in the attic in some lengthy correspondence, the Snork Maiden quietly helped the boys to pack up a bindle full of pancakes, raspberry juice, and – at the insistence of Moominmamma, who caught the three of them in the middle of their preparations – spare woolly trousers for use in case of crocodiles.

“Don’t touch any Hattifatteners, now,” the very elderly Hemulen told the boys from his rocking chair on the veranda, as they trooped past with their bindle on a stick.

Moominpappa, who was picking pears close by, leaned over on the ladder to call to them, “Don’t wear any unfamiliar hats.”

Moominmamma, at the bottom of the ladder catching pears in her apron, tssked. “Don’t give them too many _don’t_ s,” she said. “Have fun, my dears.” Spoon ran over and kissed her, and Sprocket smiled and tipped his hat. The Snork Maiden waved them goodbye from the kitchen window and watched as they floated the raft, hopped joyfully aboard, loosed the painter and set off drifting.

They were rounding the river bend when Moomintroll came down the stairs and into the kitchen, his face a cast of dismay, having looked up at an inopportune moment and out of the window. He ran out of the house, but only in time to see the raft disappear around the bend, where the river’s banks hid it.

From the kitchen the Snork Maiden saw him stop still, his back to the house; a faint sag pulled down his shoulders. She went to him, the slightest breeze ruffling her hair, and put an arm around him. “They’ll have fun,” she told him. “And they’ll be back before you know it.”

Moomintroll blinked a few times. His voice came out rather airless and thick. “I didn’t get to say good-bye.”

The Snork Maiden sighed, and squeezed his shoulders. “They’re only going down to the shore. Children need adventures! If you try to keep them from them they only want them all the more.”

A red leaf drifted down to settle at their feet, fallen from a maple that stood a little to the north of the house, its shape a little like a waving hand. Moomintroll stooped to pick it up from the grass. “Winter will be here soon,” he said. “It’s a time for preparing, not…” He sighed, and gazed in the direction that the children had gone.

The Snork Maiden smiled. “Spoon was hard to wake this morning,” she admitted. “He’ll be ready for a long sleep.”

“But not Sprocket.”

“He’s always slept til now,” the Snork Maiden said, but the hesitation in her voice was unmistakable. “Yes, he’s bigger now, but … Anyway, if he doesn’t, that doesn’t mean … anything. My will be here and awake; Too-Ticky will be, and, well, the Hemulen – there’ll be plenty of people up to keep him company.”

Moomintroll sighed. He turned, and together they walked back into the kitchen, where Moomintroll sat down at the table and rested his chin on one hand.

“Leave the past in peace, see what’s here now, and don’t worry so much. He’s not going to leave, Moomin,” his wife told him, kissing him.

“Yes,” said Moomintroll, doubtfully. “I know.” But he picked fretfully at the tablecloth. “It’s only that his father was so, well. _Rootless_.”

“Yes, my darling,” the Snork Maiden agreed, handing him a cup of coffee. “But his mother was a tree.”

*

The Snork Maiden carried her coffee mug over to the magnolia, and wished it good morning. She sat herself down on the grass at its foot, her back up against its trunk, enjoying what was now the very pronouncedly autumn sunshine on her face. “He’s a treasure,” she said, out loud.

The magnolia’s leaves stirred in the branches over her head.

The Snork Maiden sipped her coffee and listened to the declining drone of the season’s last few bees. “We _all_ miss Snufkin, you know,” she said, at length.

Overhead, the breeze in the branches sighed. The clouds were very purposeful that morning, scudding across the sky bound for points west. Between them the sky itself still shone a cornflower blue.

“I don’t know how well you knew him,” the Snork Maiden continued. “I mean, _quite_ well, I suppose. But.” She tilted her head from side to side. “You know, when I first met Moomintroll, the two of them were thick as thieves already. It was years before I found out from Sniff that they’d actually met only a day before Moomintroll met me. _One_ day.”

The branches creaked a little, see-sawing faintly as they stirred.

“He’d have been a terrible father,” she said, and then she said, “I don’t mean it. Only he did come from a line of them.” She sipped her coffee, looking a little guilty. “Hard to hope for a better one than Moomintroll, in any case. Even if he does fret so.”

She looked up at the lacework that the magnolia leaves made against the changing sky. A turning scent was coming into the air, the scent of cooling earth, of fallen petals turning invitingly into mulch, of woodsmoke overlaying windfall plums surrendered to drunk and drowsy wasps.

The Snork Maiden finished her coffee and climbed to her feet. She stood for a moment with her hands on her hips, regarding the magnolia, head craned back to consider its full and glorious crown. “If he doesn’t sleep in the winter, or if he wakes – you’ll be there, won’t you?” the Snork Maiden asked, slipping her arms around the tree. The trunk was smooth and solid, astonishingly so for the mere ten years it had stood on this spot. The Snork Maiden pressed her cheek against it and closed her eyes. “You will. He knows you will.” And she padded back toward her home.

*

When Moomintroll woke for the spring it was to an admixture of emotions so intoxicating it made his stomach lurch. Confusion, and bleariness, and loss, and fear, and hope, and against it all the backnote of primal joy that it is spring, spring again, ancient and new, and that one has been permitted to wake once again to see it. Spoon was leaping on his bed and disarranging the covers, his face a blur of new-woken happiness, and the Snork Maiden was sitting up in her bed beside his, and from upstairs he could hear the creak of the floorboards of his parents’ room. The sun was bright at the window, and before his brain could communicate with his feet they had skimmed free of the blankets and were propelling him to the window, and he was throwing open the sash, and there through the fresh delicious air came the sound of music, of notes on a harmonica insisting _All small beasts should have bows in their tails_. Down on the bridge they could make out the small figure of a Sprocket, and behind him the magnolia tree in heady and dizzying bloom. For all that Moomintroll’s heart was healed it hurt, and for all that it hurt it was healed.

They had pancakes for breakfast, and hawthorn, and coffee, hot and strong enough to cheer the dead.


End file.
